HowProjective is Projective Content? Gradience in Projectivity and At-issueness

Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g., Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g., Karttunen, 1971; Simons, 2001; Abusch, 2010), though preliminary experimental research has been able to confirm only some of the intuitions about projection variability (e.g., Smith & Hall, 2011; Xue & Onea, 2011). Given the sparse empirical evidence for projection variability, the first goal of this paper was to investigate projection variability for projective content associated with 19 expressions of American English. The second goal was to explore the hypothesis, called the Gradient Projection Principle, that content projects to the extent that it is not at-issue. The findings of two pairs of experiments provide robust empirical evidence for projection variability and for the Gradient Projection Principle. We show that many analyses of projection cannot account for the observed projection variability and discuss the implications of our finding that projective content varies in its at-issueness for an empirically adequate analysis of projection.

The so-called Family-of-Sentences variants of (1) given in (2a-d) do not entail this content because discover is embedded under entailment-canceling operators: negation in (2a), the polar question operator in (2b), the epistemic possibility modal perhaps in (2c) and the antecedent of a conditional in (2d). Since speakers who utter the sentences in (2a-d) may nevertheless be taken to be committed to the content of the complement, this content, by virtue of being able to ‘project’ over the entailment-canceling operators, is considered projective content.

(1) Felipe discovered that Mike visited Alcatraz.

(2) a. Felipe didn’t discover that Mike visited Alcatraz.

b. Did Felipe discover that Mike visited Alcatraz?

c. Perhaps Felipe discovered that Mike visited Alcatraz.

d. If Felipe discovered that Mike visited Alcatraz, he’ll get mad.

Why does projective content project? One of the most successful and widely adopted answers to this question is that projective content projects by conventionally being required to be entailed by or satisfied in the common ground of the interlocutors (e.g., Heim, 1983; van der Sandt, 1992; Geurts, 1999). On such ‘conventionalist’ approaches, the lexical entry of discover specifies that the content of its clausal complement is required to be entailed by or satisfied in the common ground of the interlocutors, thereby ensuring that the speaker is taken to be committed to the content. Since conventionalist approaches only distinguish projective and non-projective content, such approaches are challenged by the long-standing observation that some projective content is less projective than other such content. In the early 1970s already, Karttunen (1971) suggested that the content of the complement of regret in (3a) is more projective than the content of the complement of discover in (3b); following Karttunen, 1971, predicates like discover have been referred to as ‘semifactive’, in contrast to their ‘factive’ counterparts like regret (and ‘non-factive’ predicates like believe). Schlenker (2010) referred to the predicate announce as a ‘part-time trigger’ because the content of its complement may, but often does not, project.

(3)

a. John didn’t regret that he had not told the truth.

b. John didn’t discover that he had not told the truth. (Karttunen, 1971: 63)